By Paul WAHS!
So, the January sales officially ended at 23:00 last night, and thus ended a day of complete and utter madness. Truly bonkers. Ridiculous. Obscene. Mental.
Choose which descriptor you like but yesterday English Football went postal (see how many more of these I can get in over the entry!) with over £200,000,000 spent in 31 days – an average of just over £6.45M spent each day. At what point does English Football take a good look at itself and say “we’ve gone too far”.
I ask because I dedicated a good 7 or so hours of my life to this yesterday, with Sky Sports News’ flashy touch screen ‘totalizer’, ‘experts’ in Tony Cascarino and Iain Dowie and a lot of very cold reporters stood outside training grounds up and down the country literally repeating themselves for hours on end. I managed to stay with it through all of this to catch that glimpse of Fernando Torres’s car driving in to Stamford Bridge (HOLD THE BACK PAGE!), for the long shot of Andy Carrol Walking (SHOCK!) andLuis Suarez getting out of his car (STUNNER!).
What maybe got me thinking was the amount of people stood behind reporters – the kids in Newcastle didn’t look like they cared a jot about the potential sale of the best raw talent the North East has produced since Alan Shearer – oh no. They were far more interested in grinning stupidly and making hand gestures (no, not even the sweary type) to the camera. When I was younger, I remember the days of my beloved Boro signing Fabrizio Ravanelli and parading him in front of the stadium as he arrived, Juninho was stood on the pitch surrounded by photographers doing kick ups and Paul Merson signed autographs until his hand nearly fell off. Last night we see speeding cars, small groups of kids who really should have been up to no good and above all – a feature length programme based on rumours and heresay. Nearly every single SSN reporter referred back to “my very reliable source” or “the agent I recently spoke to”. These hearsay moments make the day special but last night there was none of the usual frantic panning around the country – it all went a bit, well, flat.
I have to admit to speeding on my way home to get in front of the telly, armed with the live feeds from BBC Sport and the Guardian to keep my transfer palate whet. My biggest gripe with yesterday was just how many silly stories there weren’t, I always love a good rumour that never comes true (Ronaldinho to Blackburn anyone?) but there was nothing – just Dave Whelan saying to Newcastle that Charles N’Zogbia (or Insomnia as famously dubbed by Steve Bruce) wouldn’t be going back North.
One thing yesterday that did keep me entertained was Twitter. Now, have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the micro-blogging site, but a free search for ‘Torres’ and BOOM! POW! You’re looking at hundreds upon thousands of tweets PER MINUTE! I have a video taken from Tweetdeck which I’ll add later on which underlines just how stupid the public went for this story. Twitter has its uses of course, especially for young blogs such as ourselves (and you may even have arrived here from Twitter dear reader) but it also is a breeding ground for complete rubbish. Yesterday I found myself trawling back through the tweets that some people had claimed to be their own, when in actual fact if you copy and paste, they’d just been following the BBC News or even Sky Sports feed and trying to be knowledgeable. What really ground my gears what when people decided to change one or two words too – plagiarism anyone?
Sky Sports News went as far as to do a ‘Twitter roundup’ with everyone’s favourite moron, Robbie Savage and everyone’s favourite overrated crock Rio Ferdinand chipping in – Savage announcing his intention to retire on the Social Media site and Ferdinand declaring “I love this game”. Wow, insightful Rio. They both refer to Twitter users as ‘Tweeps’, I see these two as just twerps.
I suppose the frenetic nature of yesterday maybe underlined the shift in how news media is consumed these days and it goes without saying that traditional media is somewhat now becoming dated, just as the producers of the Newcastle United 2011 calendar found out yesterday....
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